The library · The other points and bodies

Juno in Taurus

the asteroid Juno in tropical Taurus

What the tradition reads

Juno entered astrological use only in the modern period, after Eleanor Bach published the first asteroid ephemeris in 1973, and the delineations below belong to that recent practice. Cafe Astrology reads Juno's sign as the ground where a person wants to do well and wants the scales even, where unequal treatment lands hardest, and where insecurity can become manoeuvring rather than plain speech. In Taurus, the site's delineation names worry about losing security, possessions, position or place as hugely motivating, and says that insecurity can show as possessiveness and as indulgence. The lesson the same source attaches to the placement is generosity: learning to let go and to allow what will return to return, on the understanding that whatever does not return would not have satisfied in any case. It adds a correction worth keeping, that such natives are not necessarily materialistic, and that what is feared is the state of wanting more rather than the loss of any particular thing. Against Juno's general themes of commitment and fair exchange, this is a reading about what makes a bond feel solid enough to rest in, stated as the tradition's claim and not as a verdict on any bond.

The story

Hera, the Greek goddess whom the Romans equated with Juno, keeps cattle close to her in the sources. Wikipedia lists the cow, the cuckoo and the peacock among her sacred animals, and notes that she is sometimes shown holding a pomegranate as an emblem of immortality. Homer's repeated formula for her in the Iliad, boopis potnia Here, means cow eyed mistress Hera, and the same page reports the suggestion that Io, the priestess of Hera at Argos who became a consort of Zeus and who in Greek myth is transformed into a cow, may have been another form of the goddess herself, later syncretised with her. In the earliest layers of her cult the queen of the gods is thus bound up with herds, with the slow and countable wealth of an agricultural people, rather than with anything abstract. Her Roman counterpart received sacrifices of lambs and cattle at the Matronalia. A sign the tradition reads through substance, keeping and worth finds in that older material an image already fitted to it: a marriage goddess whose emblems could be counted in a field.

Written from

Corpus key point:Juno:sign:Taurus.